That, or you can create your own network by putting up one cell in a remote location like Montana (can't remember the exact place) and do everything else through roaming agreements. You don't think that Virgin Mobile owns their own network in the U.S., do you?

Why does this surprise you? Android, another Google-authored operating system (but for smartphones as you likely already know), comes with bookmarks in the browser for all sorts of non-Google properties.

What's with this cynical belief that Google is so self-serving?

Your statements are similar to those who believe Google tries to lock users into its services without ever having visited The Data Liberation Front.

Are you jealous of Google's success or something petty like that?

Never heard of The Data Liberation Front, I presume?

Or, even better, pointed the built-in camera at a URL barcode displayed on a laptop screen and downloaded the .apk file...

As has been mentioned in previous posts, native C++ development is available via the Android NDK. Even native access to OpenGL is supported.

I guess you never clicked on a URL (in the built-in browser on the phone) that points straight to an Android Package (.apk) file and simply allowed the phone to install it. No "app store" required.

There are times when the Kindle edition can save you a substantial amount:
$1519.05 off the price of the hardcover version in this case.

If you are searching for code, use Google Code Search. It supports regular expression matching, but it only searches source files (not the entire Web).

Ugh. Are you reviewing each individual commit (where code reviews are quick and very effective), or are you rounding up a bunch of developers in a conference room and reviewing an entire module using an overhead projector?

Peer-to-peer reviews of individual diffs using good workflow tools have been very effective at several places I have worked and in open-source projects to which I have committed.

Some of the fastest team development velocity I have experienced has been with peer code reviews within the team.

A good style guide also helps...

Wow. Only 5 comments and the site is already returning 500 errors.

I would suggest keeping the battery pack warm using the same power source that is being used to charge the battery. Also, insulate the battery pack, since the batteries typically warm themselves as a result of being discharged, due to their own internal resistance.

This mainly becomes an issue if you park the car somewhere for a long time in a place that is cold, but there is no way to plug the car in. I suspect that parking garages would start offering electrical outlets for charging the parked vehicles. Smart grids would probably help with this, causing the car owner to be billed for the electricity used to charge and pre-warm the car (or credited, if the car contributed excess electricity to the grid during daytime peak hours in periods of relatively mild weather).

Similarly, the car interior could be pre-warmed (or pre-cooled in the summer) when plugged in.

Google, at least, supports user data portability, and not just with. social networking.

GMail lets you import and export your contacts in a variety of formats and access your email (for back-up or whatever) via IMAP and POP.

Picasa syncs the web albums to your local machine (and runs under Linux, thanks to Google's open source contributions to Wine).

Blogger lets you push blog content elsewhere.

There are probably more (like stuff you can access via GData APIs), but these are just the ones I could think of off the top of my head.

Android includes an OpenGL API. I have personally seen Quake 1 running on the TMobile G1, which has an on-board GPU as part of the Qualcomm chipset in the phone.

Also, at the recent Google Summer of Code mentor summit in October, an Android engineer mentioned in a presentation to attendees that native (ARM) code .so files would be bundle-able in .apk files soon. These libraries would be accessible via JNI. They would initially only have access to libc and libm in the first incarnation, though.

So, yes, I do believe Android is a mobile gaming platform.

(This was discussed in a public forum at an open source conference hosted at Google, so I don't believe it is secret information...)